Meta-Fiction Quotes

Frankly, I love 'Scream': I think it's one of the great scary/funny movies.

Guerrilla ontology The basic technique of all my books . Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?

Sometimes I wonder if I'm a character being written, or if I'm writing myself.

How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?

There are a number of things that I'm trying to get into the books. There's a meta-fictional aspect, if I may use that pretentious word, to writing anything. You're writing in the shadow of all the people that have gone before and, in a way, you're having a dialogue with them. As someone who's read J.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard and all the great fantasists before, this is almost my answer to them.

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Fleabag' is its own genre. It isn't comedy. It isn't drama. It isn't even tragi-comedy.

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.

Well, I haven't done that many movies, but the best one was 'Being John Malkovich.'

What if The Odyssey has no more validity or authenticity than one of the other stories that you hear Odysseus telling? Whoever created The Odyssey was incredibly hip to stuff that we think, in our post-modernist, post-structuralist era, we're uncovering for the first time; but we aren't.

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

I do like 'The Truman Show.'

I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.

The movies I respond to are by guys like the Coen brothers and Edgar Wright, where it's hard to fit them into any one box.

Meta-fiction doesn't depend on the illusion that you're reading about real people.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

I guess my inspiration is this - I like to pretend that every story that ever happened to 'Batman' was real and is part of this one guy's life.

I don't think it's going to be possible for the next generation of writers to tell stories without telling stories about telling stories.

'The Pushcart War' is presented as a history of a conflict that has not yet taken place; in each edition of the book, the date on which the hostilities commenced is nudged forward.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Yes, Charles Yu names his main character after himself. That main character, in fact, is both time-machine repairman and author of a book called 'How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.'

Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.